Commentary on Political Economy

Friday, 31 August 2018

Descartes's World - Part 2

Descartes’s
rational idealism inaugurates a long season of Western thought in which the
separation (chorismos) of Subject and
Object, of Reason and Nature, comes to occupy a quintessential role in the
development of bourgeois industrial capitalist society. In their essence, the
cogito and the ontological proof epitomize the philosophical and political “method”
that sets the nascent bourgeoisie and its manufacturing industry off to domination
over and ultimate destruction of the ecosphere. By hypostatizing its transcendental role in the lifeworld in antinomic opposition to Nature,
Descartes elevates Reason to the instrumental
mastery of a prostrate Nature likened to a maze of physical-mathematical “laws”
destined to be manipulated and subjugated by the human mathesis universalis and its Scientia
inveniendi.

In his
exposition of the ontological argument and of the cogito, Descartes confuses two kinds of “existence”, one ideal and
the other physical. Just like the idea of God, the notion of a triangle
“exists” in thought as a universal; but it does not exist physically in the way a particular triangle or a depiction of
God can (say, in a painting). What exists is the cerebral activity that enables
the thought of a God and that of a triangle – and the particular triangular
shapes and depictions of God that we encounter in the world which can never be
equated with that cerebral activity. It is not that thought can be reduced to
cerebral activity: but neither can cerebral activity be sublimated to ideal or
divine existence! The two forms of existence simply cannot be homologated –
they are heterogeneous – because no human activity or thought can com-prehend the entire world! Physical
objects and our idea of them “exist” in two very different, yet equally
“material” ways: Descartes wrongly deduces
physical existence from the mere “idea” of God as perfect Being just as he had
earlier wrongly deduced the existence of an Ego or self from the mere act of
thinking because his metaphysics wrongly opposes thought and matter by wrongly
defining them.

This
metaphysical prejudice, this chorismos
is by no means confined to Descartes because it dates from the dawn of
philosophy in pre-Socratic Greece. Indeed, by categorically separating thought
and matter and hypostatizing the purity and perfection of thought, Descartes turns
his rationalism into an eschatology
in that the entirety of human existence and the world is pre-destined. In such a
world, of course, no freedom is possible, no creative activity is imaginable –
which raises the question of how Descartes and all the theoreticians of the mathesis universalis, the readers of the
“great book” of divine creation (Leonardo, Galileo, Descartes himself), could
ever envisage that their own scientific activity was even possible! To be
conscious of a reality, however binding, is already to pose the possibility of
being free from that reality, of being able to act upon it not just by
trans-forming it but rather by trans-crescing it – indeed, by trans-scending it
not in a “spiritual” or “idealistic” sense, but rather by considering that all
“reality” is always and everywhere a human convention, a human construction.
Quite surprisingly, it will be Descartes’s great contemporary critic, Thomas
Hobbes, who will inaugurate this line of thought – running through Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche to Mach and Wittgenstein – which combines the conventionality of
science with the hypothesis of possessive individualism to arrive at a uniquely
pessimistic view of human existence. For Descartes and the earlier
rationalists, instead, the future of humanity, already pre-destined in the
great book of eternal divine laws, could not but be optimistic – indeed, as we
have argued, eschatological even in an Augustinian if not Leibnizian sense.

For
Descartes, however, the only options to escape the evident antinomy between the
self and the world, between individual and cosmos, and the deadening determinism
of his geometric science,were either to
hypothesize a mechanical correspondence between the two opposing dimensions of
mind and matter, a’ la Leibniz (the
windowless monads) – or else to exasperate the original idealism of the cogito so as to amplify and deepen its scope
as a generator of productive knowledge and activity. This latter option is
precisely what Descartes proceeded to expound in the Meditations and then most explicitly in the Principia Philosophiae. (On all this, Negri, op.cit., chpts.3 and 4.)

When thought closely reviews the different
ideas and notions it has within itself, and it finds that of an omniscient,
omnipotent and extremely perfect being, it easily judges, from what it
perceives in this idea, that God, which is the extremely perfect being, is or
exists. For, even if thought possesses
distinct ideas of many other things, it
does not observe in them anything that assures it as to the existence of their
object; while in this one it perceives not only, as in others, a possible existence, but an absolutely
necessary and eternal existence.

As in the Meditations, Descartes starts from the
ability of the intellect to conceive of simple abstract notions from which logico-mathematical
conclusions may be deduced. But here there is a subtle shift from the earlier
work: here the priority and emphasis is no longer on the cogito, that is, on the deduction of the existence of the self from
the act of thinking – I think, therefore
I am. Here, instead, it is the ability of the intellect to deduce God’s existence from the thought of divine
perfection that marks the separation of human reason from the world. But whereas
earlier, as we demonstrated above, this chorismos
of the mind leaves it entirely “withdrawn” from the world – and therefore capable
only of obtaining formal and passive knowledge of it through the mathesis - to understand but not to
change or transform it -; this time Descartes introduces a new ability to human
intuition and deduction by quite drastically allowing the possibility of error -
and therefore also the ability to comprehend the world actively,
scientifically, practically, productively! Thus, Descartes at once elevates Reason
from the sphere of self-consciousness to that of divine participation (methexis), but then, simultaneously, he
seeks to reduce the distance of the human intellect, its separation (chorismos) from the world, by highlighting
its ability to fall into error!

For the
first time in Cartesian philosophy, we have the simultaneous ability of the mind to mount the heights of perfection
and to plumb the depths of nothingness, - an ability that seals the positioning
of human knowledge between perfection and imperfection, between knowledge and
error. Not only: the possibility of error allows Descartes also to allow for
the intromission of Evil in the world – evil understood not as diabolical
action but rather as the existence of freedom, of free choice, and therefore of
ethics and morality. (On this Schellingian conception of Evil, see Zizek.)

Two forms
of existence, then: the divine existence which is “absolutely necessary and
eternal”, on one side, and then that of “many other things”, which is only
“possible”. The self-same intellect that can intuit the idea of God with
certainty and then deduce His existence from this intuition – that very same
intellect also “possesses distinct ideas of many other things” about which it
can draw deductions that may be in error. But how can the intellect at once
know and not know, be able to learn scientifically, and still be capable of
error? Descartes attributes human fallibility to the faculty of the will – the conatus that urges the intellect to overleap
the boundaries of knowledge – and therefore to err. But a will, a conatus, an appetitus, is a drive that exits the sphere of the intellect to enter that of the senses. Of course, none of this serves
effectively to bridge the hiatus
irrationalis between intellect and world: all that can be said is that at
least Descartes has allowed for the possibility of the immersion of the
intellect in the world.

Further to
this, the above quotation renders explicit Descartes’ssecond necessary ingredient for the
development of a productive epistemology through the distinction between
intuition and deduction (which Joachim had deemed “crude”). In the sequel to the
pivotal paragraph quoted above lies the proof:

And just as, by seeing necessarily in its
idea of the triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles, it [thought]
absolutely convinces itself [of this conclusion]…, so it is that simply by
seeing that necessary and eternal existence is contained in the idea that it
has of the extremely perfect Being, it must conclude that this extremely
perfect Being is or exists.

Yes. As
Joachim argues, the deduction of the equality or congruence of the internal
juxtaposition of the three angles in all triangles is necessarily contained in
the idea of a triangle. But the idea of a triangle is quite distinct as intuition from all the deductions that may follow (necessarily,
as tautologies) from the idea!

I am taking the word ‘idea’ to refer to
whateveris immediately (m.e.) perceived by the mind (Descartes, Third
Meditation)

Thus,
whereas intuition is “immediate”, deduction – as the word itself suggests, “to lead
from” – is mediate. Joachim fails to see this crucial distinction. Crucial,
because it leads us to the next extrinsication of Descartes’s “reasonable
ideology”. It is only on the basis of this distinction between intuition and
deduction that Descartes’s ontology can be turned from a pure “scientific
knowledge” of the world as an inalterable, unchangeable, strictly determined
reality into a productive epistemology, into a practical science through which
the world becomes susceptible to transformation by the human will. The intuition
of an idea can never be wrong or false – but a deduction from it can, if it is
carried out incorrectly! To be sure, Descartes’s understanding of deduction –
as “logical”, and therefore necessarily tautological
– does not remove the antinomy of thought and world, of essence and existence.
But here Descartes has deviated from his own epistemological schema and, following
Bacon and anticipating Hume, is now allowing for empirical induction in
scientific research as well as, anticipating Kant, for the drawing of synthetic a priori statements in the
establishment of “scientific laws”.

Taken to extremes, in its detailed
specification of the various faculties of the Ego (intuition, deduction,
intellect, imagination and memory, then the senses), Descartes’s metaphysics
which, from the outset, anticipates Kant’s critical idealism (whence the keen
interest of neo-Kantians like Cassirer in Descartes) ends up being a pale
replica of Berkeley’s subjective idealism in which all reality exists in the
mind of God – esse est percipi. But
Descartes never goes to such extreme lengths: his metaphysics always seeks to
reconcile (antinomically) the ideal and the real. Regardless, this fresh schism
between intellect and will proposed in the Principia,
this further splitting of the faculties of the Ego, cannot assist Descartes in
determining the extent to which the will is operative in its pursuit of worldly
objects; nor does the will, a mental faculty, resolve the fundamental antinomy
between the Subject and the Object. Cartesian idealism is unable to set out the
boundaries of human knowledge (in epistemology) and the content of the entities
involved (in ontology), the intellectus
and the voluntas or conatus. Yet clearly here we have a
definite shift from the metaphysical-deductive
method of the earlier writings to a physical-inductive
one, much closer to the mechanicist materialism of Hobbes. (The all-important
differentiation between Cartesian idealism and Hobbesian materialism will be
canvassed in our next study.)

Descartes’s
novel, if belated, hypothesis admits of the freedom of the human will, however
inconsistently, by mimicking the omnipotent will of God. This “erring” of
reason into the world (Latin, errare,
means also “to roam”), spurred on by the will, is certainly a passive process
of re-searching the world – what Descartes
calls “knowledge” or scientia, or the
vera mathesis. But it is also a
process of recovery of the world throughdis-covery, through invention (the Cartesian Scientia inveniendi) – it is the
reconquest of Truth. Again, however contradictory this might be in view of
Descartes’s antinomic idealism, there can be no doubting his belief in the
ability of science to reconstruct the world, to lead humanity a defecto ad perfectionem (see Negri,
op.cit., pp.296 ff.).

Even the
ubiquitous mechanicism of Descartes’s earlier method regarding the ontological
status of Nature vis-à-vis Reason and the Soul takes a different metaphoricalturn in the Principia.
Here, in the Preface Letter, Descartes outlines a view of the sciences that
quite evidently seeks to bridge the earlier categorical schism between metaphysics
and the natural sciences:

The first
part of philosophy is metaphysics, which contains the principles of knowledge,
including the explanation of the principal attributes of God, the non-material
nature of our souls and all the clear and distinct notions which are in us. The
second part is physics, where, after discovering the true principles of material
things, we examine the general composition of the entire universe….Next we need
to examine individually the nature of plants, of animals, and, above all, of
man, so that we may be capable later on of discovering the other sciences which
are beneficial to man. Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots
are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk
are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones,
namely medicine, mechanics and morals.”

Unlike a mechanical metaphor – likening,
for example, science to a house whose foundations are metaphysics, pillars are
physics, and so on -, the adoption of a metaphorical tree to describe the
various stages of human knowledge does a number of things that Descartes had
not attempted or allowed earlier: (i) science is no longer relegated to the logico-mathematical
faculties of humans, to the intellect; (ii) science has a physis, an organic structure that is biologically as well as historically
connected; (iii) science has practical aspects – technologies - that can
transform human reality and the world; (iv) therefore, science allows for
freedom and free choice, free will. Yet again, Descartes’s confusion and
ambivalence on these matters is evinced by his listing of “morals” amongst the
sciences, implying thereby that moral action may itself be founded
scientifically! Needless to say, the apories in this stylization of knowledge
and scientific research are everywhere to be seen. Above all, it is “the
non-material nature of the soul” and the dichotomy between “appearance” and
“reality” that epitomizes those “antinomies of bourgeois thought” [Lukacs] that
have been the universal bane of Western theory and practice since Descartes.
Again, these will be canvassed in the next part of this study.

Of course, this “tree of knowledge” (arbor scientiarum) metaphor is still
intimately tied with the universal mathesis scientific movement that dates back
to Lull and Bruno and then continues to Descartes and Hobbes, as Rossi explains
here: -

The term clavisuniversalis[universal key]was
used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to designate a method or
general science which would enable man to see beyond the veil of phenomenal
appearances, or the 'shadows of ideas', and grasp the ideal and essential
structure of reality. Deciphering the alphabet of the world; reading the signs
imprinted by the divine mind in the book of nature; discovering the
correspondence between the original forms of the universe and the structures of
human thought; constructing a perfect language capable of eliminating all
equivocations and putting us in direct contact with things and essences rather
than signs; the construction of total encyclopaedias and ordered
classifications which would be the true 'mirrors' of cosmic harmony — these
were the objectives of the numerous defenders, apologists and expositors of
Lullism and artificial memory between the fourteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies….

An
instrument designed with practical rhetorical puposes in mind becomes (after
the encounter with the

xviii
Logic and the Art of Memory

Lullist
tradition) a search for a 'code' which would allow one to penetrate into the
innermost secrets of reality, and to infinitely extend man's potential. Ramus,
Bacon and Descartes also profoundly changed the meanings of traditional
problems when they included the doctrines of artificial memory within the
framework of a doctrine of ‘method' or logic, or made use of the idea of the
'chain' (catena) or 'tree of the
sciences' (arborscientiarum). The artificial memory of the ancients (driven by new
imperatives and profoundly transfigured) entered into modern logic, bringing
with it the themes of ‘universal language' and 'general' or 'primary' science. (P.
Rossi, Logica e Memoria)

Once more, the inescapable apory of the mathesis universalis is that, if the
universe is strictly determined, then any scientific effort to discover its “language”
must be an intrinsic part of this deterministic mathesis – which renders scientific research strictly paradoxical
in the sense that “science” is unable to understand itself as “science”, as
“free” historical human activity! The difficulty is that science has a history: in other words, far from revealing “universal
laws”, scientific research and conventions are products of human choices –
contradicting the deterministic universalist claims of the mathesis!
Furthermore, as a corollary, the very distinction between “reality” and “appearance”
only serves to make untenable the assumption of an “ultimate reality” or a Kantian
“thing-in-itself” that lies “behind” the appearances. Indeed, it was the dogmatic
dismissal of scientific empirical induction as reliant on mere phenomena, on the
sphere of “appearances, that first excited and incited the revolt against Scholasticism
beginning with Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes.